UV Systems for the Food and Beverage Market

UV Disinfection does not add anything to water or food, nor does it generate harmful by-products or alter aesthetic appearance or quality

UV disinfection also only requires a fraction of the contact time required by other disinfection methods. It's fast, efficient, effective, economical and environmentally-friendly.

UV has conventionally been used to treat water that is clear & fresh, but it can also be used to effectively disinfect not-so-clear water streams, provided the UV equipment is sized appropriately to account for the difference in water quality.

Food and Beverage Resources

Download Vegetable Washwater Technical Brief [pdf: 139 KB]
Technical Brief describing a pilot study for disinfecting vegetable wash/rinse water so that the water could be re-circulated and reused, carried out at a vegetable processing and packaging company in Canada.

UV vs. Pasteurization

Heat treatment-pasteurization techniques are efficient in handling low UV transmittance (UVT) and some degree of suspended solids (SS) and total dissolved solids (TDS) and are preferred by many product producers. However, pasteurization is expensive and UV can be efficient as the pasteurization and energy costs continue to rise. UV is a non-chemical process and doesn’t change any physical characteristic of the fluid, and concerns of chemical handling and cost of removal of chlorine from the water stream are eliminated.

Most importantly, UV treatment does not promote the generation of disinfection by-products, such as Trihalomethanes (THM), which regulatory agencies have classified as carcinogenic at certain levels in drinking water.